How to recover from Google Penguin and Google Panda

People are freaking out about the new Google Search. Online marketplaces that have historically been very profitable in the past have dropped off a cliff for many companies, be it direct sales eCommerce or public relations campaigns. Everyone wants to know both why this has happened and how to make it right. What’s changed, post-Penguin and post-Panda, is that organic SEO isn’t free, cheap, and easy anymore. First, everyone’s piled on to organic SEO; secondly, all the tricks that have worked — guest blogging, link-marketing (Viglink, Skimlinks, etc), directory farms, site aggregators, pay-per-posting, etc — are not a lock anymore; thirdly, organic SEO demands a profound commitment to social media, and not just Google+; finally, since Google now owns the Internet, it can now monitor the web like a spider: it feels every single vibration and now knows exactly what everything on its web is: it is a fat, juicy bug full of blood (a legitimately interesting, useful, and germane-to-the-search site) or is it just an empty, hollow exoskeletal husk blown into the web, empty and devoid of nutritious content).

In the past, too, Google was a little desperate. To be honest, beggars couldn’t be choosers. Google really needed to allow a very nascent industry to mature. Everyone was making stupid mistakes, including mainstream media, newspapers, major aggregators, and everyone else. Whenever Google administers too much stick, it always eventually “softens” its algorithm in response to very vocal and influential clients (who probably also coincidentally spend a lot of money on Google AdWord ads). That said, you could very well lose your shirt in the time it takes Google to soften its algorithm enough to return your site back to the first page from being excommunicated to the 5th page of Google.

While Google will smite sinners viciously, sending you into the wilderness of search, Google’s also very compassionate. That said, whenever it smites search sinners, it never reverts its algorithm completely: it hardens once and only softens a fraction — it’s more real-world fine-tuning than ceding ground.

With Panda and Penguin, Google can now tell whether online content has gravitas: mass, momentum It understands what true organic content looks like, feels like, sounds like, if you will, on the web. How it moves through cyberspace. It’s algorithm is quickly becoming a de facto web content Turing test. It checks things such as how the content accelerates, how it is adopted by others, whether there’s a warm pulse over time (or, it is a web zombie?) — no longer can you just turf your entire online brand to some turn-key “panacea” solution like you could before.

And here’s an under-reported Google secret: there are lots and lots of humans who make their living from using their human eyes and Google training (and probably a very cool Google Search QA dashboard) to scrutinize sites that set off Google’s automated site Bozo Filter. Google wants you to believe that the algorithm is all robots, spiders, bots, and math, but, with the advent of Panda and Penguin, Google Search is people! Google Search is people!

What can you do, then?

Google SEO is the new Google AdWords

Back in the day, Google AdWords could be had cheap. Not anymore. Everyone’s online, and globally, too. More recently, it wasn’t too tough, with a little creativity, to own your unique vertical on search — or at least be able to make it to the first page. Not anymore, you can’t. Now, you’ll have to invest time, talent, and treasure to the endeavor; luckily, if you’re making a majority of your income and referrals from the Internet, you’ll already know how valuable it is to you; otherwise, it really won’t matter — you probably only use your web site as a reputation direct destination for when people up you and your brand via direct URL or from a personal- or company name-specific search. However, if you’ve made serious revenue in the past and all that’s dropped off suddenly, open your wallet and spend, though not on yet another SEO link-peddler. Let me explain.

Back to Hearts and Minds

Digital PR and social media marketing may well be the new SEO. If popularity, pickup, sharing, and social are the newest and most-preferred method for tracking which sites are useful, valuable, popular, or successful, then you will surely need to…

Earn, Don’t Buy, Your Friends

While it’s so easy to buy Twitter followers — and sometimes practically useful for kickstarting a new Twitter account or for impressing people and clients who are impressed by raw numbers or high-ratio of followers to followed — if Fake Follower Check can sort out which followers are fake, which are inactive, and which are Good (for my @chrisabraham account on Twitter, it’s 1% fake, 5% inactive, and 95% good out of 44,381 followers), so can Google. So, another example of Google vaccinating against just throwing money at the problem. Instead, you’ll probably need to spend money on Twitter and Facebook advertising if you want to earn easy Likes and followers; otherwise, you can cross-promote your social media properties across all aspects of your company, making sure that your multiple social media profiles are fully-integrated into the rest of your brand. You’ll probably want to hire someone — a community manager or an outside social media consultant — either for a short-term bootcamp to get your started or someone you can just work with over the long term, be it internally or outsourced.

Online Engagement and Blogger Outreach

The sad and pathetic thing about running your linking campaign through robots and zombie sites and over the artifice of guest blogs, link advertising, pay-per-post, comment-spamming*, trackback spamming*, and link-farming* (*people are still doing this so it must work, right?) is that is doesn’t give the true online community enough credit. Or, maybe it gives the online community too much credit. I recently spoke to a bona fide, traditional, PR executive (for the most traditional PR industry, pharma) and he told me that everyone’s still deeply afraid of the unpredictable nature of the organic blogosphere. That said, an online engagement campaign is powerful mojo. If you’re able to find a way to identify and engage your most natural (and plentiful) allies online, through finding them online, where they already live, and engage them; or, discover who they are — their names and emails — and reach out to them as if they were mainstream media (broadcast, TV, radio, print) with your message, your news, your vision, your announcement and either encourage them to blog about you or prospect them to become your long-term ally.

Unlike the structured, predictable, low-fidelity, zombie hoards that make up the robot armies of paid-for content, earned media tends to be more durable and happily leverages the trust networks associated with each and every online influencer who picks up, experiences, resonates with, and reports your message on their platforms, starting with their blog but then cascading through their Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Tumbler, and then deeper via their RSS news feeds across digg news, Feedly, Flipboard, reddit, StumbleUpon, digg, Delicious, and any number of other aggregator platforms — this is the real, varied, ripple-effect that is hard for AI-zombie-robot-armies to emulate. Thus, the Turing test. Real organic content pickup — earned media — is real. And real always passes all of Google’s tests — even all Turing test as administered by Google human army of Turing testers! Google’s BS-detectors are not only humans but probably unemployed English Majors, Graduate Students, and PhD candidates.

A Faster Website

All things being equal, Google rewards site speed and quickness. Latency is punished, all things being equal; however in a world where everyone uses the same version of WordPress, the same plugins, and often the same template, choosing a good tech who can make sure you’re able to extract the best performance possible from your web site, avoid plug-in performance pitfalls, and eliminate site duplicate content and other redundancies and loops that might lead Google to mistake your honest mom-and-pop site for spam. If you’re running a super-sophisticated and complex e-commerce site you probably already have a good tech on retainer; however, look into finding someone like me who can help you sort out words like “acceptable ping times” and “site latency” — someone who’s familiar with things such as Google PageSpeed. At the end of the day, Google really wants to “make the web faster” — if you help them, they will reward you. Remember, the more popular your site, the slower it’ll probably be. The better you’re doing, the harder your server will work. Add to that the sort of attention spike that a successful online engagement campaign can result in — a true network effect — and you’ll need to make sure that your site either has durability built in or offers the ability to burst its performance in real-time response to site popularity — what happens when and if your content “goes viral?” What happens if and when your site is mentioned on the radio, TV, or print? Will it crash or slow to a crawl? If you’re going to spend time and energy doing all the work I am recommending here, you’d better make sure you don’t wilt under all the new attention.

Better Domain Name

Google is still painfully literal. If you want to own a specific keyword phrase, maybe your domain name should reflect that phrase; Or, if you’re known for your full name instead of your acronym — or if your acronym includes valuable keywords that your acronym does not, then maybe you should just use your fancy acronym-based URL for your emails and for reference over the phone but use your company name spelled-out for everything else.

Better Site Architecture

If you’re using a proprietary Content Management System (CMS) you might want to consider choosing another platform — something that Google understands. Also, in order to make your site content as easy-as-possible for Google, implement an XML-based Sitemap for both your site content and for your images. There are sitemap plugins for WordPress and modules for Drupal that are super-easy to use and work directly with Bing and Google through both of their webmaster tools. What’s more, there are very simple plugins and modules that you can easily install into WordPress and Drupal sites that will optimize and standardize your site’s architecture to comply completely to Google’s search specifications.

So, can’t afford all this? It may be time to sell your Summer cottage (the season’s almost over) or mortgage your family home. No matter what, you’ll surely need to come up with some quick budget if you want to start competing again. Do it. In the words of Terry, played by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.”

So, what about you? Will you be a contender or are you going to choose bum?

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